Give Feedback on Wollongong Council's Strategic Plan!

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Understorey Landscape Architects know that meaningful change is only possible through collective advocacy and collaboration. Although we are a small and newly established practice, we feel responsible to use our voice and modest platform to champion regenerative, inclusive, and Country-centred approaches to city-making. Our feedback is offered in the spirit of care for Wollongong, a place we love and share, and where we see immense potential for leadership in environmental, cultural, and social innovation. Understorey is preparing comments for Wollongong Council's Strategic Plan and we encourage you to do the same. Give feedback by Wednesday 7 May

We are sharing our notes here in the hope that you might find some of the ideas useful for your own comments. 

Please read the linked document for responses to each of Council's 4 goals, but here's a summary of our recommendations:

Deepen the Commitment to Environmental and Cultural Care

The draft CSP exhibits weakened references to environmental protection and ecological sustainability in its Vision and Goals. We recommend reinstating and strengthening commitments to protecting and regenerating the environment across all areas of planning, with explicit reference to Country, biodiversity, and ecological resilience. Council should formally adopt Connecting with Country as an integrated approach across all goals, embedding collaboration with Dharawal Traditional Owners, cultural care, and First Nations knowledge systems into all city planning and design processes.

Move Beyond Sustainability Towards Regeneration

Global cities leading climate and urban transformation (e.g., Copenhagen, Melbourne’s Green Infrastructure Plan, Paris’s Urban Forest initiatives) are moving beyond sustainability into net-positive, regenerative practices. Wollongong should set ambitious targets for:

• Net gain in biodiversity.
• Climate-positive construction and landscapes.
• Hyperlocal planting to repair soil, increase canopy, and support native wildlife and multispecies thriving.
• Circular economies that reuse, regenerate, and minimise emissions.

Foster Hyperlocal, Place-Responsive Design

Each neighbourhood from escarpment to coast should celebrate its distinct natural systems (including their specific pre-Invasion ecological communities), histories, and communities. Council should embed hyperlocal placemaking principles to resist generic urbanisation and protect Wollongong’s rich and diverse local identities. Urban renewal should prioritise Country-centred, co-designed, community-led public realm improvements that celebrate local culture, ecology, and diversity. Our local Aboriginal Elders and Traditional Owners must be engaged in these processes.

Embrace Culture, Creativity, and Ecological Storytelling

Landscape, art, and public spaces must be recognised as living cultural infrastructure, not just amenities, and consider More-than-human experience (flora, fauna, seasonality). Cultural vibrancy must include Country-centred and multispecies creativity, embedding Dharawal and First Nations, ecological, and community narratives into city life. 

Center Equity, Inclusion, and Justice in Urban Transformation

Social equity must be designed into climate resilience strategies: Affordable housing close to green infrastructure; Equitable access to public spaces, active transport, and healthy landscapes. Council should embed decolonising principles — amplifying Dharawal and First Nations voices, creating leadership pathways for Traditional Owners, and embedding Indigenous governance into major projects.

Wollongong has the opportunity to become a global leader in regenerative, culturally connected, and resilient city-making. Build on the prestigious UCI Bike City title that already places us as a leader - this CSP should commit Wollongong to a future of care for Country, creativity, connection, and climate leadership. 

Understorey knows that meaningful change is only possible through collective advocacy and collaboration. Although we are a small and newly established practice, we feel responsible to use our voice and modest platform to champion regenerative, inclusive, and Country-centred approaches to city-making. Our feedback is offered in the spirit of care for Wollongong, a place we love and share, and where we see immense potential for leadership in environmental, cultural, and social innovation.

Understorey had the pleasure of talking with The Illawarra Flame's Jeremy Lasek about some ideas we have to improve green infrastructure in Wollongong. Have a read! 

Lend your support via feedback to Wollongong Council to get some very simple repairs done on the bike track south of Wollongong, as well as incorporate more planting for cooling, habitat, biodiversity value, and beauty on precious Dharawal lands. 

We believe there is great privilege in designing public spaces and this comes with responsibility to advocate for quality and justice. We are grateful for the work of  the Illawarra Bicycle Users Group (IBUG) for their inclusive work in this space. We encourage you to join IBUG.

‘Horrible’ cycleway from city to the south needs urgent investment, Council told

The Illawarra Flame

Bianca Hester’s sculpture and walk series is on throug April at Wollongong Botanic Garden’s Sculpture in the Garden. It shows the power of the smallest shift in maintenance. A few weeks’ pause in mowing can transform open space into a haven for critters - and people.

Bianca Hester’s sculpture and walk series is on throug April at Wollongong Botanic Garden’s Sculpture in the Garden. It shows the power of the smallest shift in maintenance. A few weeks’ pause in mowing can transform open space into a haven for critters - and people.

This feels timely here on epically biodiverse Dharawal lands. Can we come together to champion this living asset that urgently needs protection? How can we shift maintenance and design away from business as usual to the thriving of Country? 

Colonisation of the Illawarra brought genocide and the parallel devastating destruction of forests, grasslands, and coastal ecologies and this harm continues with development. But there are advocates who’ve been standing up for plants—Emma Rooksby and Leon Fuller of Growing Illawarra Natives for example, and they co-led the walk with Bianca.

You’ll see in the WBG sculptures that artists share these concerns —like Greer Taylor’s 'Translucence: grief tells you what you love' (pic6). Amid these stitched messages, I ran into Kirli Saunders who was there with Taylor - I was so excited because she is such a champion of care for Country @kirli.saunders

As Bianca says, protecting Illawarra’s biodiversity takes an interdisciplinary approach—all hands on deck - and all feet gently on Country. The work reminds me of my favourite landscape architecture projects like Marti Franch’s Girona Shores and terremoto landscape ’s Test Plots and writings on grasslands by Chloe Walsh (now at Hassell) - all centred on collaborating as more-than-human communities to confront anthropocene catastrophe, and to take care with land and life.

Circuits of Solar Descent:

“...a walking series, unmown circles of grass as gathering points, and bronze sculptures bearing impressions of Illawarra based plant life from across timescales. Walks, led by me with collaborators, will explore the ecologies of the botanic garden as well as remnant bushland within the ‘Keira Green Corridor’...”Bianca Hester’s sculpture and walk series is on throug April at Wollongong Botanic Garden’s Sculpture in the Garden. It shows the power of the smallest shift in maintenance. A few weeks’ pause in mowing can transform open space into a haven for critters - and people.

 Gadigal and Wangal Country of Eora, Iron Cove Creek, Sydney

*This project is featured in PLAT Journal #13

The journal comes out of the Rice School of Architecture 

"Plat 13: Alchemy embraces design as a transformative dialogue intertwining creation, transformation, and combination. The works featured in this issue traverse geographies as diverse as rural America, industrial China, the ditches of Australia, and the deserts of Saudi Arabia—each exploring design’s potential to reshape and reimagine. Within its pages, contributors examine themes such as natural resilience, the radical ways human beings inhabit their environments, the dehumanizing possibilities of spatial and territorial constructs, and design’s capacity to convey and subsume emotion. Some of the contributions offer solutions; others cast light on overlooked or marginalized issues.

Through architecture, landscape, urbanism, and design, we chart, strategize, and shape our environment by altering, restoring, and reimagining spaces. If earth serves as the prima materia, then the alchemical process of design transforms buildings, landscapes, objects, and urban assemblages into forms that touch every aspect of life."

Shimmer is a translation of the Yolngu term ‘bir’yun’. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose first learned of this Aboriginal concept in the Victoria River region of the Northern Territory, so-called ‘Australia’. Shimmer announces deep time, present, and eco-futures that connect with ‘lively, powerful, interactive worlds that ride the waves of ancestral power’. It is a ‘gleaming ephemeral moment of capture’, and showcases the well-being of Country. 

Kathryn Morgan and Kirst Willis